Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a liquid discharge device and a liquid discharge head, or more specifically, to temperature control of a liquid discharge head.
Description of the Related Art
A technique described in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2007-021944 has been known as an aspect of temperature control of a liquid such as an ink in a liquid discharge head like a recording head, which is used in a liquid discharge device as typified by an inkjet recording apparatus. Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2007-021944 describes heating control of inks for discharge ports that perform discharge and discharge ports that do not perform discharge, which is conducted in accordance with recording data for the respective discharge ports.
However, according to the temperature control disclosed in Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. 2007-021944, a target temperature of the control is usually set higher than an environmental temperature. For this reason, the inks at the discharge ports that do not perform discharge are also heated along with the temperature control, whereby evaporation of certain ink components such as volatile components is promoted. As a consequence, the inks are likely to increase color material concentrations and viscosities, which may lead to color unevenness of an image recorded as well as deterioration in dot landing accuracy attributed to a change in ink discharge speed, and eventually to deterioration in quality of a recorded image. This problem may become noticeable particularly in a liquid discharge head of a so-called full-line type which includes numerous discharge ports arrayed.